A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
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> But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times!—they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. [...] These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless, worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread.
There is a lot of proganda use of "luddites" as anti-tech when luddites main grief was regarding income and inequality.
[1]: http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html
[2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/byron-was-one-few-...
Agreed
> In modern developed countries we have social security benefits, health care and such, to varying degrees depending on the country, to try and make sure people don't starve like that.
And the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. (Both China and Europe have a more stable society compared to the USA so not quite sure how the bet of this thread would have gone if evaluated over either Europe or China)
Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.
The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
One problem is fixable.
EDIT: And also, unless your brother has had a major health event, then the reality is he has no idea whether his insurance is any good.
But just to entertain this discussion (big mistake), the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, which means that useful price signals for how to allocate resources are missing. You'll perhaps say: "Well it shouldn't be like that". I agree but there is a reason it ended up like this.
My brother doesn't need a serious health event to know (for a reasonable definition of "know") because he has a brain and people to talk to with direct and indirect experience of the system.
Yes you absolutely can, here in the UK I've had private health insurance from my employers for the last 23 years of my career. I'm not aware of any country that outlaws paying for private treatment.
https://www.vox.com/health-care/2019/2/12/18215430/single-pa...
> Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
Is it? I am fortunate enough to not be in this position, but I'm not sure how much I would care about the reasons why if I were.
That's not including the costs of follow up treatment, the increased cost of your insurance after an event which changes your risk category, or the byzantine system by which your job will be gently encouraged to let go of a "significant risk factor" because it will reduce the cost of them providing health insurance.
And in reality - people in socialized healthcare systems aren't denied life saving treatment. The availability of treatment is a priority list for "elective" surgery - that is, surgery not immediately necessary to save one's life. And this also does not affect the availability of private care - in Australia you always have the option to pay for private treatment, but controversy over waiting times exists precisely because the vast majority cannot afford to pay. And our costs are cheaper then US to start with if you do.
Hence the original question of how rich the OP's father was: because the reality is, if he wanted surgery right away he most likely could have got it. That he didn't is telling - because he actually couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford to fly to the US and have it done either. The US would have "denied" them treatment just as assuredly. And they did eventually get it where they were.
However, we should not be blind to limitations of a UK style system. There are also in-between alternatives, such as in Germany or to a lesser extent Japan.
Both are fixable. Given enough money.
But if not fixed the results will be the same.
Not trying to be argumentative, but what is this based on? I’ve known people who received major heart surgeries without insurance and certainly didn’t have that kind of money.
[0] https://www.cbpp.org/great-recessions-jobs-deficit-much-deep...
They were tricked into loans they couldn't afford. And with all blue-collar jobs being exported at alarming rate to Asia, i would say that the recovery after that recession doesn't ring true to me.
Sure economy and gdp are higher up, but its not because poor recovered. They were left behind.
Trump won presidency mainly because he turned to those people and promised them the good old time, where the town had its steelworks and everyone had quite life.
I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money.
EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So we can say the EU is keeping financial wizardry in check because if left to the US, no one would know what is going on.
The EU might just save us all.
Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?
As far as I'm aware, that was because they printed tons of money. Money was printed in the EU too, but stopped much sooner - far too soon. As if people forgot about Keynes.
And actually I think you have some of this backwards. If you have a good social security net, you don't have to protect workers as much.
Likewise, health care is an investment in human capital. When people are ill, they can't produce.
The European (i.e Eurozone/EU) recovery was knocked back by the raising of interest rates by the ECB in 2011.
And finally, the US did recover better because they put a lot more proportionally into stimulus (even though it wasn't enough, as later events showed).
I'm not sure that you can suggest that the flexible labour market was a cause of that (and indeed, one would have expected the UK to recover quicker than the rest of Europe then, as they have more flexible labour laws).
To be clear I'm not saying their system is superior, I think it goes too far. Poverty and what I consider labour exploitation are much more common over there. Also I think it's pretty clear now that significant increases in minimum wages don't seem to significantly increase unemployment, for example, but on severance pay particularly it's pretty clear this is a tradeoff.
There are proven links between economic insecurity and the rise of political extremism, and it's manifestly incorrect to suggest that corporate economics operates in a moral and political vacuum with no political consequences.
http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/74766/1/EPS_2018_accepted%20ver...
Conversely low worker protections correlate strongly with the absence of the above.
Why do you think that is?
I live outside the US and I can assure you the universal healthcare here doesn’t not provide the same level of care that even Medicaid does in the US. Sure if I had a routine broken arm there would be little difference, but if I had a serious cancer I’d be dead here.
As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/09/how-t...
Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.
This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings.
Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom"
The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.
Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all.
I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...
Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the steelworker's unemployment check "wouldn't count" is if 100% of it was taxed away in the course of spending it.
Even your fevered conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense! What motivation do you imagine the paper author has? The paper[1] spends a substantial amount of time focusing on poor US outcomes, and its point is that current US policy isn't actually saving us any money relative to the rest of the OECD, so our outcomes aren't even trading off against net economic benefit (at least first-order). Suboptimal distribution of our social spending (as in your ridiculous examples) falls squarely into this category, and as such is a potential target for the paper's criticism.
Economists would like everything to be dollars, because that means you can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and get answers that work. Centuries of this not working haven't dissuaded them and I don't expect my rant to change that.
People who actually think we should care about population welfare do not try to squint at the dollar figures like this paper, you'll see them looking at policies qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and this way you don't need to draw a dozen charts to come to the apparently startling revelation that the US is a wealthy country in which money is being stolen from the poor to be wasted by the rich and this is a bad idea.
Sometimes this sort of work will be excused on the rationale that it will guide political decision making. This is an error perhaps everywhere and certainly in the US. A Republican is not going to read this paper and say "Aha! My policies were mistaken, I can actually have better impact by reducing tax breaks on the wealthy and directing the increased income to the poorest". They're going to glance at it, conclude it does not support the policies they wish to enact and so it's irrelevant.
A country committing genocide against its own citizens is not a stable society.
It’s quite different in my experience. Workers can be employed in another state with almost no friction (with the possibility of a income tax declaration at hire) but it’s a lot more complicated to work internationally.
In any case, the US has very high levels of per capita social welfare spending.
> In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren’t primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world.
In America and a lot of other rich countries I can imagine a large workforce just sort of slowly dissipating as they are made redundant by the unstoppable force of technology, but at least a few places may strongly disagree about the unstoppability, and put it to the test.
The faded-out version is what I think will happen in the USA. My point was that there are countries with much more confrontational labor movements (France in particular) and I think there will be truck smashers (burners, blockers, etc) there long before a majority of truckers become ex-truckers.
counterpoint:
> Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891779
Why imagine? The US working class is "slowly dissipating" in many ways:
* Homelessness
* Substance abuse, especially legal opiates
* Increase in mortality rates
etc.
<< When economists invoke the "lump-of-labour fallacy" I have to wonder how much research they have done on the history of the fallacy claim and how much documentation they have looked at on opinions of people who are alleged to believe there is a fixed number of jobs in the economy. I have done extensive research on these matters and the answer seems to be 0 and 0. >>
[0] http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/01/sandwichmans-lump-of-...
However, that does not mean that those displaced from work will not struggle to find new jobs. You're not going to turn most coal miners into coders. There's also no guarantee that you replace automated jobs with better jobs. Much of the service sector work that's been created in recent years has been low wage.
TLDR: Just because there will still be jobs, does not mean they will be good ones or that the workforce can easily shift to them.
I am surprised that this was regarded as a close decision. I guess a lot depends on wording, but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question, I wonder if they're just saying that to be diplomatic.
Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty, but one way to think about it, is that it can get so much worse than it currently is. And it seems like the predictions being wagered over were pointing to the "so much worse". I think the same holds for the environment, and for the proposed war between rich and poor.
I get the temptation to treat those as close, because there's tensions that you could imagine leading to some worst case scenarios. And so one might want to acknowledge the tension, and you want to put that acknowledgment into some sort of partial credit. But I think that way of thinking gets all confused and hair splitty, and comes from a place of thinking everything's a trick question, and not wanting to be perceived as overlooking nuances.
Anyhow, credit to all parties involved for formalizing their discussion and getting a bet out of it. I think those kinds of conversations are valuable, and I think it helps to get people thinking about what it takes for beliefs to be true over the long run.
>“The first [measurement] would be an economic collapse. The dollar would be worthless, the yen would be worthless, the mark would be worthless—the dislocation we saw in the Depression of 1930, magnified many times over.
The dollar is not worthless and not close to worthless. There's no reasonable interpretation of that outcome, or of reality, where the dollar becoming worthless was "close" to an accurate prediction. I truly, honestly don't know how to reason with someone who is going to dispute that.
Another prediction was that we would be in an active global military conflict between rich and poor nations. Also not close.
Another prediction was "Africa, from the Sahara to South Africa, becomes unlivable."
If words actually mean things, none of these were close.
> an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
Now, you sound like you have a source other than the article, and the article sounds like it might be a paraphrase. But it's kind of hard for me to judge without knowing what your source is.
But, using the wording from the article: Were we close to the first of those in 2008? When Lehman collapsed, if there hadn't been intervention the dominoes would have continued to fall. How far would they have continued to fall? Hard to tell now, but at the time it looked like they were just going to keep falling...
Yes, they were the words of the bet.
>I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe—a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won't even be close. I'll bet on my optimism.
It seems like in the actual terms of the bet Kelly paraphrases Sale. That is how I would read it sans an actual signed legal document. But then again I'm not a lawyer or anyone versed in gambling etiquette and protocol.
Why would anyone take this bet? If you're right, then $1000 USD probably won't be worth very much after the "global currency collapse", so you'd basically be saying "I'll give you $1000 in 2020 if it's worth anything"
The other (perfectly plausible) answer is that the part of one's brain that believes the claim, and the part of ones' brain that believes in the power of bets and value of money that make bets interesting, are brain regions that haven't reconciled with one another.
So ask yourself the question again. Why would two public intellectuals make a public bet, when neither stands to gain any monetary benefit from it? My goodness, it's a mystery.
It would seem to be against the spirit and intention of the bet, in any plausible reading, to grant Sale a win on the grounds that (2) comes true but not (1), when (1) was attempting to paraphrase (2).
In US terms it seems clear that financial support in excess of that available in 2009 onwards will be provided.
Vaccines are being delivered and economic activity will increase as the fear of COVID-19 subsides.
Is this based on political gridlock after the next set of US midterms? Something not COVID-19 related?
Massive change due to tech is always just waiting to happen. Here's to hoping it just changes society without destroying it.
Great quote! Gradually and unknowingly you approach a tipping point until some factor pushes you over the edge like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back".
I believe Sale was/is broadly right. Some of Nassim Taleb's ideas also play into this viz. our inability to predict the future and the catastrophic effect of non-linear and "black swan" events. It is not "Technology" that is the problem but our stewardship of it. We simply are not taking a holistic system view of it which is absolutely necessary when our system (i.e. our planet) is "closed".
I don't know what that is going to look like though so I'm not taking any concrete bets. I certainly don't know what comes after.
I think the following factors, broadly speaking; will be our (i.e. Civilization as we know it today) downfall;
* Environmental Disaster as a consequence of rampant consumerism. The planet simply cannot sustain it. Our current "Renewables/Recyclables/Carbon Credit etc." policies are a joke. We have forgotten that our planet is a closed system with finite resources.
* Our "Baser" Instincts - We will always subvert any and all technological advances towards the pursuit of power, wealth, and greed and exclude "others" (i.e. those not belonging to our group) thus increasing the "inequalities" in our society.
* Non-linear "catastrophic" effects of many of our social systems - As Nassim Taleb points out in his books, many of our systems are non-linear in their effects and inherently fragile. Thus our ability to predict the long-term future is non-existent.
* The rise of mono-culture biological and social systems. Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units eg. Madagascar/Australia vs. Asia/Europe, small self-sustaining villages/kingdoms bartering amongst themselves vs. megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a "common currency". This makes the entire system fragile to local shocks.
* Adaptation and Evolution of other species against our measures towards controlling them eg. "Superbugs".> Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units
No, it did not. Evolution does what it does, things that are good enough at surviving survive. For instance, multicellular organisms, and in particular large animals, are "megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a 'common currency'". Fragility is a more nuanced topic too, large coupled systems are vulnerable to internal problems, but they can also withstand external forces that would kill the equivalently populous "loosely coupled federation". All in all, evolution is probably not the best thing to draw lessons about organization from, because a) any system of organization you can think of is likely already effectively used in some organisms, somewhere, and b) evolution doesn't care about well-being of individual cells, but we care about the well-being of individual humans. That last constraint means we can't just do thing the way evolution does, which is throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.
If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.
Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated.
I agree though that total nuclear war would be way worse than all the tribal wars in history. Although, interestingly, it seems like threat of nuclear war has prevented lots of wars. There have been no wars between major powers since nuclear wars. Maybe the closest was the Korean War, but China wasn’t a nuclear power back then.
AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.
Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.
The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).
I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.
I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.
This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].
There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction
>We have made untold advances in the medical sciences
Out of reach of a lot of humanity and for those that can access it it is not without risks (just look at the medical devices debacle in the US). It also isn't as good as we often seem to believe. For example the US is number 7 in Deaths by heart attack but it is still double the amount of deaths as number 1[0].
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Acording to EIA[1] "The share of U.S. total energy consumption that originated from fossil fuels has fallen from its peak of 94% in 1966 to 80% in 2018". 80% is not "divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels". It will be at least ten years before we see another 10% down in the US.
>we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Yet human rights, press freedom and economic freedom are all on a downswing in the US[2][3][4].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
1: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41353
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
Too many folks gulped Pinker’s nonsense without further inspection because it suited their priors.
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other -- I guess my prior is that I am skeptical of broad narratives one way or the other and I think Pinker is prone to facile generalizations -- but most of the rebuttals I've seen to Pinker seem offended by the idea of progress, rather than taking his arguments seriously.
That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above it. The world population grew by 1.6 billion between 1990 and 2010 according to the UN. So on one side we have the "one billion have been lifted out of extreme poverty" but on the other we have "1.6 billion more humans" with the greatest growth in poverty stricken countries like Nigeria. I don't know the numbers but I don't believe that the "about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty" is the whole truth since AFAIK the amount in extreme poverty have grown.
EDIT: Looking up the numbers it hasn't "grown" but "extreme poverty" is seen as "statically less than 1.9 international dollars per day". Is it a lift to $3 or $30? $3 is still living in squalor and destitution if you ask most people in the West I'm sure. IMO extreme poverty haven't declined outside statistics.
From: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality
And I think you’re underestimating the marginal utility of going from $1.90 to $3 — both would suck for someone with a baseline of Western expenses, but it is the difference between a literal hand-to-mouth life of subsistence farming in a shack, versus a family that all works being able to collectively afford to rent a basic concrete flat with terrible plumbing on an unpaved street (citation: my ex took me to Nairobi a few years ago, we met one of her local friends, the friend’s flat was about $800/year to rent, $800/year is the increased income from two people going from $1.9 to $3 per day).
This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.
You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.
It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.
I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).
Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.
The situation in Africa isn't so good, but has substantially improved. Of course the cost of this has been stagnant wage growth and anaemic employment in the developed world, as hundreds of thousands of people in China and South East Asia joined the global labour pool.
All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.
Oh and this
we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Isn't just wrong, it's laughable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
If you want a really long read - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civi...
The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping). Not now, not ever. Not possible.
...if you’re a well compensated tech worker having gourmet lunch delivered by benefit-less contractors paid slave wages.
And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.
Conventional oil reserves are declining so this article merely proves that renewables are superior.
I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.
For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.
As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.
Could you back this claim up? I don’t find it at all plausible.
Note that it is not just Sale (though of course he is quite extremist in his views) who has pointed to the deleterious effects of our Technology, Social systems etc. which may lead to "Collapse" of our Civilization; you also have Nassim Taleb, Jacques Ellul, Michael Ruppert espousing similar arguments in different contexts.
All that you mention are "local effects" having their own unforeseen long-term negatives, due to self-limiting feedback loops, for example (without making any moral/judgemental/ethical calls);
>global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades
Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
>untold advances in the medical sciences
True but the other side is also adapting itself to work around our efforts eg; "Superbugs". We also don't know what the long-term effects of genetic engineering would be. There is also the problem that advanced medicine leads to longer lives and thus more pressure on social safety nets and healthcare.
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Wishful thinking; we have a long way to go and given our propensity for short-term fixes we may very well run out of time.
>when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Awareness does not necessarily lead to Usage/Implementation.
The above is not to say that "good old days" were "very good" and we should blindly roll back our scientific and technological use. On the contrary just like we have realized that Atomic warfare is unlike anything ever experienced by mankind and hence has to be prevented and dealt with in a whole different way than we have ever handled our "differences", so should our use of Science/Technology towards the betterment of our Societies, Other Species, Natural Resources and ultimately the whole Planet.
Taken globally, and looking at purchasing power. Things have been massively improving for the very poorest. Because developing countries are doing just that, developing.
Inequality and poverty are two distinct things. Poverty is having lack of access to things you need. Inequality is becoming a big issue, and poverty is far from being solved. There certainly are opportunities to solve both problems. But the depth of poverty for a lot of humans has lessened the last few years, and that is undeniably a good thing.
> The global poverty line has been on steady decline
That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
What does 50% mortality mean here?
This seems surprising to me. What do you think is the best source for me to learn about this metric? I found a lot of info on the methodology behind $1.9/day [0] but couldn’t find much by looking for the $7.50/day mark and how it has changed over time.
I found this guardian article referencing $7.4/day [1] but the link they give to Peter Edward on an ethical poverty line doesn’t work. When I search for Edward’s concept I find papers from him [2] but they seem to reference $2/day.
Edit: I was able to find a gapminder analysis [3]. They break income into four groups, less than $2, less than $8, less than $32, more. The shift in poverty is still positive so I’m not sure what measure is being used to show 1B more under $7.5/day. This may be due to demographic trends where that group is growing faster. It is important to consider the overall proportion, not just absolute number, as well as the alternative of where they would have been (ie, a billion under $7.50 is better than a billion under $1.9).
But it’s hard to discuss without source data and methods.
[0] http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/methodology.aspx [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/014365905004327... [3] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2020;;&ch...
The author addresses this question, along with how the UN has continually shifted the goal posts to reinforce the narrative that poverty has been reduced.
This quote mixes the two concepts “ Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day.” and doesn’t provide context on whether the percent of the worlds population living in less than $5/day is better or worse than in 1960.
Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
This is not the method described in the world bank web site. I don’t think the intent is to boil down to a single measure.
Tracking data globally is really challenging, so a consistent and meaningful measure is required to even have a hope of a perspective across countries. It’s useful in eradicating poverty to both measure progress or failure as well as to prioritize investment for areas of greatest need.
This also isn’t the only measure of poverty as there’s many others and there’s quite a bit of literature in global health on other measures as well.
That being said, I think there is room for improvement both in developing more useful metrics as well as improving accuracy of measures.
If I your were in India which was a deep socialist state in 1980s and 1995 just when the seeds of 1992 reforms were sowed, it was a complete shithole compared to the India of 2020 even with COVID.
I would rather live in an unsustainable India of 2020 than in sustainable India of 1985.
Debt is not really much of a problem for India as debt of gdp ratio is pretty low. Debt is not a problem in terms of sustainability either, when the proverbial shit hits the fan the country might go into massive recession but even in the worst of worst cases and even with terrible politicians at help recessions don't last very long. But the gain upto that point are all real. (India has over 50M more young and healthy people purely because the country has eliminated Polio and dozen other diseases that were common 40 years ago).
Rising population and rapid urbanization would require India to manage its forests, water and other resources better and India is not equipped to do so because of government control of key industries and bad policies. But we can hope things will change for better as a more competent government is at helm.
He did not think the currency issue was close at all, "Not much contest here" and granted that one unequivocally to Kelly.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
As for war between rich and poor, I think it should be judged compared to historical examples. Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no. Occupy came and went. The global economy recovered ok from the crisis in 2008 by historical standards. Advanced technology is already solving the pandemic for us, and we should be back to normal economically within a few years. Only 4 years ago a Billionair won a US election on a platform of cutting taxes for the rich, which he did. If there's a war going on between rich and poor, I'm not seeing it.
Thank you for catching that, I stand corrected with respect to the judging of the economy. It's interesting that there are commenters here taking issue with my point disputing that, when it turns out not even the judge, Bill Patrick, felt that question was close! People will really debate anything.
As you point out, Bill did, however, remark that the other questions were close, and asserted that Kirk was not merely close, but correct(!) on the other two questions. I am surprised about that, for reasons more or less along the lines you mention.
And this is what scares me. From my point of view, we are already well into multiple major environmental disasters. I wonder how much worse it has to get before more people realise that.
I’d argue the drivers for the war are already here, but the only reason the war isn’t class based is the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them. They’ve successfully driven in dividing lines such as race and religion to distract us as the plunder to their hearts content.
I mean it sort of relates to the 2nd amendment idea that private citizens at home with firearms can overthrow a tyrannical government if need be. When it was minutemen vs foot soldiers that was a drastically different equation to now when it's AR-15s vs a military-industrial apparatus with drone strikes, tanks and automated mass surveillance.
The observation that "the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them" seems like a reasonable tactic for the society (or the rich) to prevent such a war from occurring, and this might plausibly succeed for a prolonged time in the future - as you say, "successfully driven in dividing lines" that are long-lasting. I see Kirkpatrick Sale's position as essentially claiming that the tensions are stronger than the societal bonds that favor status quo and centralization, that these tensions can cause a society to collapse - and the last 25 years have shown the opposite, that an increase in these tensions is still tolerable and does not lead to a collapse.
He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
The first part of the bet is a good one: the dollar -- the world's reserve currency -- becoming worthless is something that makes sense as a part of society collapsing, and more importantly, it's fairly objective to judge. The other two are far more ambiguous.
Yeah, this is exactly the thing I'm stuck on when I go over these responses. I feel like people really aren't grasping the difference in scale between (a) 2008 financial crisis was pretty bad and (b) dollar becoming "worthless".
People are talking as if those two things are close, or taking up the tone of cautionary finger wagging and saying "well, you know he wasn't too far off" and going off to say this or that about a given poverty statistic.
My best theory as to what's going on here is that people are just cannibalizing the question and using it as a digression into various world problems in ways that don't clearly connect back to the wording of the question.
I recently watched the documentary The Man Who Saved the World[0], about Stanislav Petrov, who one day in 1983 made the decision to ignore the early warning system computers telling him the USA had fired 5 missiles at the USSR.[1] It seems had he followed orders, a report to his superiors would have resulted in mass retaliation. The decision was in his hands.
In the movie, as well as a reenactment of the incident, the real Petrov visits the USA to speak at the UN, and visits Kevin Costner, his favourite actor. Costner asks him how many people would have died if not for his actions that day. You expect him to say millions. Petrov explains that everyone on the planet would've died.
They visit a disused missile silo in the USA and Petrov explains to a guard there that just one of those missiles had more explosive force than all the weapons used in WW2. According to this page[2], in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+.
It's very chilling, to say the least. It makes humans seem so very crazy, to create the possibility of that situation in the first place. Petrov explains emotionally to the guard that the Russian people wanted peace, and thought the USA wanted to attack them.
I can't help thinking about that, reading about Whether Tech Has Destroyed Society?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Saved_the_World
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the damage each one of these devices can do why do you need so many.
Lets presume you're in fact a genocidal maniac (i didn't say the roleplaying would be difficult America) 1 bomb per enemy military installation and 1 bomb per population centre over 100k population friend, foe, own country included.
Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs?
Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946.
People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational.
And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone would have cared about the cost?
Even if it is, say, twice the cost to shoot down a missile as to launch it the US can afford more than twice the cost the Russians and much more than North Korea.
But it isn’t 2x. Try 10-20x. Modern MIRV’s can have ten warheads, and it is also substantially more difficult to target a moving missile than to hit a launch silo. Tests so far have not been anywhere near the accuracy needed to confidently guarantee you could shoot down a first strength. You need 100% performance, they’re getting less than 50%, for ideal conditions.
The economics just don’t work with a 20x cost gap. What’s more the attempt to built a unilateral defence system would encourage a massive arms race.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...
This drives the need to be able to respond.
In that context, you are already so resigned at killing others over your own safety, that hitting a few other countries is a no-brainer.
It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets".
EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.
I believe the (arguably crazy) idea was that the weapons wouldn't ever be used. The fact that each nuclear superpower has a similar amount of weapons assured that the equalibrium would stop the worst from happening.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
I get the feeling that's not generally known. Isn't that kind of extremely weird? I've never seen discussion of it on HN, for example, or maybe what to do about the prospect of living indefinitely under the threat of MAD. With more countries with nuclear weapons all the time. Well, you read here about people not wanting to have kids because of global warming, but not because of that. Is it just too big a problem to even think about?
But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. It also gives rise to certain paradoxes - like any attempt to create a better defense against nuclear weapons is also the biggest threat to mankind, because it risks breaking the MAD doctrine and thus inviting a nuclear first strike. For MAD to work, countries in their equivalence class (e.g. US, Russia and China are one class) need to be in lock step with their capabilities, so that no one can be struck without the attacker risking annihilation.
There seems a kind of anthropic principle here - it seems successful, but we wouldn't be here talking about it if it had gone terribly wrong, which has come very close to happening more than a few times, apparently.
The risk of that is >0, but the cost is...infinite. That doesn't seem obviously worth the gamble, to say the least.
I just don't buy the apparent absolute certainty it won't kill everyone. Then anything else would have been preferable to the "stable equilibrium" we were assured was necessary. But we won't be around to talk about it. That eternally living under MAD is 'the only way' seems to me more like a religious belief than a realization of a fact. A uniquely insane/evil one, however you want to describe killing everyone on Earth. Perhaps it's not considered so evil or insane to do that if you meant well?
It is the presumptive fact in the absence of viable alternatives. IF one is discovered, we can revisit the question.
What's more worrying is that most nuclear policy in the US was centered around condensing launch authority solely with the President of the United States - there's a heck of a lot of assumption that that person is a sane, rational elder statesmen type.
Even in your cited example - the people who do this sort of thing attack those who can't fight back. They are never in any danger of being immediately shot dead after.
While yes suicide bombers exist, this is more a question of arms proliferation and control then an indictment of the ineffectiveness of MAD or the general strategic reality of nuclear weapons. And the situations under which non-state actors have them are still a policing rather then political concern - North Korea or Iran leaking a bomb to another entity that then detonates it is the surest possible way that both those states will be dismantled by NATO, since MAD does apply there: proof that you represent an uncontrolled risk of nuclear attack invites conventional or nuclear annihilation, regardless of the mechanism. Civilian casualties go out the window when you have already suffered some.
It's a tough goal - perhaps the hardest there has ever been - but it's not impossible.
A world peace might be plausible through a single world government that can enforce a world peace and resolution of diverging interests and conflicts without war, i.e. with some "policing" mechanism instead of relying on people not escalating through sheer goodwill. That is possible - world peace based on the expectation that any potential violators of that world peace would face retaliation and lose in that conflict. Si vis pacem, para bellum - that can work, if it can be established.
Or, alternatively, a world peace through mutual respect and tolerance may happen if at some time in future our civilization consists of substantially altered individuals - genetic alteration, chemical brainwashing, computerized circuits in brains, something that changes the way our motivation works on a fundamental level - but not for people as we are.
Otherwise, as long as any people and groups of people have unmet desires (not merely needs) and diverging interests, conflicts will happen, and as long as violence is a practical option for achieving goals (i.e. there's not a threat/expectation of successful powerful resistance to that violence) it will be considered and used if mere threat of that violence isn't sufficient.
IMO, if MAD fails it will be an accident that triggers a run away chain of events leading to nuclear war. We've come close many many times to total nuclear war due to miscommunication, simulation errors, procedural errors, etc.
Mind you, a single nuke on e.g. DC or NY would cripple the country already, especially if there's minimal warning.
Second-wave strategic targets ( surviving silos, airfields, ports and C3 facilities )
Tactical targets ( tank formations , POL depots, troop assembly areas, aviation FOBs )
Naval targets ( submarines, surface vessels, sonar installations )
Mobility targets ( bridges, valleys, tunnels )
Plus accounting for failed weapons, losses en route, missed targets...
Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"
This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapon...
"The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime,”...The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs... which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.
W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each ... the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-wea...
Sounds like serious money to me. More details about which companies are making the most money and how:
http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies...
It’s tiny. The claim I was arguing against was this:
> the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society
You can’t control society with 0.17% of US GDP!
Note also that most of that spending does not flow to arms contractors so the actual figure is less. The bulk is spend on the defense department and other government agencies.
Here’s the report your article cites. See page 9
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ican/pages/1549/attach...
>> the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society
> You can’t control society with 0.17% of US GDP!
That doesn't seem fair. The companies involved are involved in a lot more than nuclear weapons, as I guess you know. (see my last 2 links)
As I said, 0.17% of gdp covers all the spending, including on govt salaries. Only a portion of that actually goes to manufacturers.
PDF: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/...
Truman would later regret creating one of the several monsters that ate his soul [0], but he was clearly out of his depth from the moment that he learned of atomic weapons. None of the top military brass wanted to use the atomic bomb. [1] The reptiles knew what they were doing in 1944 when they replaced Henry Wallace with an easily controlled Missouri hick. Truman himself didn't know their precise plans, but he had to know he wasn't the man who should've gotten that job. He let ambition overrule propriety.
Of course, Truman isn't the only human to blame for the mess we've been in for 75 years. Most of the scientists who developed the bomb knew better than he did what the result would be. "MAD" is not an acceptable condition for human life. We endure it because some reptiles desired further enrichment. No good intentions paved their way to their current location.
Throughout our existence, USA's projections of the worst possible intentions on the part of other nations have driven our deepest depravities, to a far greater extent than the real situations we've faced.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/trumans-true-warning-on-the-ci...
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-the-us-really-bo...
Using nuclear weapons is one of the most bureaucratic processes the government has by design. There are an awful lot of people in the loop that must work in concert to make something like that happen.
Good reason for us to personally think about (and investigate) whether our political/societal enemies really believe what we're told they believe about us. And I don't mean respond to a tweet, I mean have a real conversation.
Kinda feels like we're in an arms race where Facebook/Twitter are the arms dealers and have so much to gain from continued hostilities.
So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very short post to his blog saying it happened. [1]
What’s most interesting to me is that the blog has since disappeared. At the time these things seemed like such a big deal, but a few years on and it just vanished. It’s like the bet never took place and the advocacy for Hydrogen wasn’t a big deal. It was kind of shocking to me how ephemeral it is, in spite of “nothing ever disappearing from the internet”
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160911231646/http://www.h2carb...
At least 8,890 FCEVs are on the road today, a far cry from the 53,000 the California Fuel Cell Partnership projected by the end of 2017. "I don't see a lot of automaker interest in hydrogen," DeShazo argued. "Most automakers are betting on battery electric vehicles for the passenger market and delivery trucks."Dec 12, 2020
If you're a natural gas producer, it makes a lot of sense to pump hydrogen fuel. Ignorant* people think it is green, so it is an easy sell to the populous. Since it is actually made from NatGas, the success of hydrogen would be a significant boon to a substance that has been teetering on the edge of being industrial waste for years.
* Unknowing, not stupid.
Although I think turning natural gas into hydrogen is wasteful it still proves that current usage of fossil fuels is not sustainable by showing that a "sort of" sustainable way of using fossil fuels exists.
Hasn't been the reality for me. I would prefer to be behind the scenes but that's not whats always been the case. I like the financial outcome though.
> Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it.
> But Sale had read it—and rejected it.
> “I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.”
> Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short. Sale says he is seeking some sort of appellate relief, if only by public opinion, when in fact the rules included no such reconsideration. Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,” he says.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sale fellow sounds like an asshole.
Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.
Ultimately it depends what you want out of your personal relationships. I’ve found people who are willing to talk. But I haven’t found people who genuinely change their mind about deeply held beliefs without a lot of patient — emphasis on patient — conversations over a long period of time. And sometimes I’m the one who changes their mind.
So I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied if you feel you must be able to change your group’s minds about social issues. A group is its own form of entity. If you don’t identify with your group, find another one. They exist. But if you don’t identify with your associates, that’s a hard problem which won’t go away.
It helps to accept that you care about them more than what they believe, and leave it at that.
Are you sure?
I don’t know. It helped me to view it as “yes, this is selfish. They’re more important to me than the topic.”
The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Another way to phrase it: why care so much what they think? If they don’t explain themselves, then they probably don’t care whether you agree.
To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Looking at the things you wrote:
> They’re more important to me than the topic.
Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
> The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Perhaps. But the interpretation is still not immediately "selfishness" for me. You are not there to please them and make them feel good. But how does that immediately become "selfish"?
> To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Yes, that is a good introspective question, that one maybe should ask oneself.
However, if anything that could somehow be interpreted as "wanting something for oneself" is considered selfish, then we can shut down all our media right now and stop talking to everyone else. You can always claim "You did this or that conversation only to feel good about yourself! So Selfish!"
So I am asking: What is your definition of selfishness?
You care about the topic, they don't want to talk about it for whatever reason. You are trying to get them to do something they don't like, because _you_ like it.
As stubborn as you think those people are, they have a good case for arguing that you are just as stubborn if not more so.
By genuinely adopting this viewpoint, not only will you likely have a more productive discussion, but you may reconsider some of your own priors.
edit: Probably better after Covid.
Says the person with a true neutral alignment.
The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks. How you "can't avoid politics, because everything is political". Ravelry, which is a crocheting website, went mad with us-vs-them discussions. Why?
The fault is mainly with legacy media, because they had the credibility and prestige of their history, plus the consistency of their output (daily, weekly, whatever), which they used to spoonfeed poison to large parts of society. How others are "unlike us", and that "they're evil", and oh by the way, "vote for our candidate" who is the some storybook hero we need.
The "two-minutes-of-hate" has come largely from legacy media, and they are responsible for the schisms present right now.
>The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks.
Everything you've outlined above is entirely the result of technology and the incentive structures that have been pursued in its "advancement".
I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major communication breakdowns, but I think on the whole it's a positive development.
Usually it's not one specific event but a bombardment of information that over time, hopefully gives someone more perspective and their place in the world.
On the other hand, it closes some people off and causes the echo chamber. Cuts both ways.
almost certainly is
This is just more of my opinion, but generally the people I know that get caught up in bad echo chambers would have done so without the internet. The Alex Jones fans are just a new iteration of Rush Limbaugh fans, albeit more extreme. I think it's possible for otherwise reasonable people to get caught up in something like that, but they can also get out with time and more life experience.
Doesn't sound anything like my bubble, my city or my country. (Not the USA)
I have heard that bleak description before, just never experienced it.
For example if you liked to go out and play poker in a local bar in the 1920s. It Required actual poker skills, but also good banter, and had an element of danger to it. Seems like your brain neurones would be firing, just to keep up with the banter at the table while you downed whiskey trying not to lose too much money.
Now so many people stay at home, watch some TV or watch some porn, fall asleep and go to work the next day. And things are safe, virtual and fake.
Technology has made movies possible, I love movies. But I value the experience of reading a book differently. Its a much richer and deeper experience. And technology made it very cheap now with things like kindles. But still I think there's been a decline in the amount of people reading books. Even though I think society would be enriched from more people reading books. Its now the average person has easier lazier entertainment to occupy them.
50-60 years ago you weren't constantly bombarding yourself with people who have more than you. Today, people go on instagram and see the rich living the dreams they'll never be able to attain, despite being told they could do anything in school and by their parents. People watch porn which shows insanely attractive people doing any fantasy imaginable, with no effort on their part.
Their regular lives will never compare with that, they get depressed and anxious seeing how they are nowhere near these people. And then this leads to anger and eventually populism, and it'll eventually lead to war.
> We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
People in the US literally refuse to wear masks to protect others around them. Do you really think this is possible?
But yes, large positive paradigm shifts are possible. They are also necessary, and we must begin the work. To decentralize production of goods/services as much as possible, to make food and energy plentiful and free for all, etc. We will accomplish these goals and more.
Plus you are ignoring all the bad parts. Don't want to be a stay at home wife and be bored out of your mind? Too bad. Wrong tone or sexual preference? Whoops. Don't want to get black lung or mind numbing-factory work? Better luck next time.
There is a selection bias at work. Only notable people are portrayed in media, for the most part. But the past is filled with atrociously empty and broken lives.
You didn't see the mentally disabled in the basement, the arrest of wounded veterans under "ugly" laws justified by maternal impression theory an utterly moronic misreading of biblical miracles as implying what the mother sees influnces form of the child. Except there is a major derth of livestock how to's in the bible and a lot more focus on miracles.
Lies deserve destruction.
> “Oh, boy,” Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. “This is easy money.”
> For the men involved, the bet’s outcome would be a personal validation—or repudiation—of their lifelong quests.
Neither man comes through looking good. Kelly seems to have wanted to kick a weak adversary.
Kelly did win, literally (according to the bet/judge) and conceptually:
> [Sales's] book is called The Collapse of 2020—and yes, the neo-Luddite’s latest work is available on Kindle. In fact, Sale has made compromises with technology. He recently moved back to Ithaca with his wife to be near family. He does have a computer, as well as a printer, a land line, a stove, two televisions, and four radios. He draws the line at microwaves and smartphones. Despite believing that social media has “a visible deleterious effect,” he has a public Facebook page
But this is just sad all round.
"The very fact that his book exists, he wrote, is the equivalent of tossing his cards face down on the table: If society had in fact collapsed, there would be no books, self-published or not. “So let me just admit that I was wrong,” he wrote. “But ... not by much. And not totally.” "
They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
There would not be a new book printed about this topic if society had regressed as you described.
Really whenever you hear anyone talk about "the fabric of society" they are full of shit. Just like how theater, jazz, rock music, heavy metal, rap, interracial marriage, women voting, and gay marriage destroyed the fabric of society. Those ample precedents of being complete bullshit aside it is a stack of abstractions with no measures. It sounds like it means something but it doesn't - it is just mouth noises to manipulate your emotions.
They're not in the science game. They're in the selling content game. In that, all three (let's not forget the person writing the article) appear to have succeeded, gaining exposure (and payment for the article writer) thanks to the bet, regardless of rigor.
One could perhaps forsee more books and articles forthcoming as a result of this bet?
(English is not my first language)
This is one of those stupid things about English that make life for pupils harder for no reason. In most languages the abbreviation is straightforward and based on the actual language. (Also spelling bees don't exist in most other places). Entire classes of error possibilities are just made up for no good reason in English.
(also, it's orthogonal, not orthagonal)
I'm curious what distinction you are reading into it. I'm sure that as a native learner I was more apt to just take mental shortcuts rather than resolve these ambiguities.
I assumed "for example" follows a collection/set as opposed to "that is" which is a 1-1 mapping. Sibling comment clarified it for me on why "for example" makes sense in this context.
As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF?
“That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz.) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-derived abbreviation) leads into an example intended to illustrate the broader category which precedes it.
They are not equivalent, nor are they “skip over phrases”.
Totally different meaning if you replace i.e. with e.g.
The first is saying “HackerNews” is the same as “my daily updates on technology” .
The second (replacing “i.e.” with “e.g.”) is saying “HackerNews” is an example—one item in a broader collection—of “my daily updates on technology”.
Take a look at a car (i.e. an automobile).
Take a look at a car (e.g. a Nissan).
Do you see the difference?
They are often used as equivalents. Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
> Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
Sure, but descriptivism isn't “words lose all distinct meaning if occasionally someone mixes them up” or nothing would mean anything.
Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used? People don't know which is which, they often don't car,e and they pick one.
Prescriptivist "what should eg mean in this sentence?"
Descriptivist "what does Bob mean when he uses eg in this sentence?"
No, it's not.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “that is” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “for example”.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “for example” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “that is”.
Neither group (not the one with the dominant understanding nor the one with the minority understanding) uses the terms interchangeably, they both use them with distinct meanings.
The existence of some confusion of meaning and minority usages resulting from that does not eliminate all distinction in meaning, even from a descriptivist standpoint.
It's true that “X means Y” is usually a simplification of a distribution to a modal value, but that's also widely recognized and, from a descriptivist standpoint, already incorporated into the meaning of the phrase.
That's what each means, correct.
> (English is not my first language)
That's okay, it's not the first language of id est and exempli gratia, either.
In 1995 a person could have bought a US Treasury zero coupon bond for about $130 maturing in 25 years for . . . $1000. No other purchase would have been necessary to cover the bet. Relatively cheap insurance, I think.
It wasn't close. It isn't hard to tell that it wasn't close. Let's not give this doomsayer more credit than he's earned -- and he was completely wrong.
It is generally men who talk about how great the subsistence economy was. For women, a subsistence economy was hellish. There was no reliable birth control, maternal/infant mortality was high, everything depended on physical strength which gave men an advantage due to their larger size and higher musculature on average, and the system demanded lots of children, so women spent much of their lives pregnant and/or caring for small children. Many of these cultures (see Papua New Guinea for example) have huge amounts of violence against women.
What solution do we have? I'm pretty sure that even before homo sapiens came on the scene, Neanderthals and even earlier versions of humanity thought about labor-saving devices. They dreamed of not dying from little infections, of not dying in childbirth, of spears that went a little further, of furs that were warmer, of fires that would not need tending. Are we not more or less doomed by our rejection of physical misery and the power of our imagination to simply recreate it all?
More interestingly, imagine a human society which selects a place to stop and then also has to enforce it, both internally and against any other societies which might have a different idea of where to stop (boy that gunpowder sure is a nifty idea). You would need a one world government with some kind of technological edge over those ruled ...
By virtually every material measure society has improved in the intervening time, in spite of the horrendous response to the financial crisis of 2008 and even the bungled response to SARS-COV-2.
Lots silly self-indulgent stuff that is really indirectly about alienation and whatnot, get over yourselves!
Its not like I don't stress about democratic backsliding and income inequality and God knows what else but the big picture perspective is clear, Sale is obviously so wrong that he should be embarrassed. But he's a crank, so he's doubling down.
I have to confess that I have never been so optimistic as I am now about global interest in addressing climate change, there is going to be a lot of pain but we have the technology to make a lot of progress. I think that once people get a taste of the benefits of electrification in particular momentum will build quickly.
Always fun to read that. They weren't against machines because they had a religious fear of machines. The machines were taking their jobs.
Just like Facebook is complaining now that Apple is ruining their business model?
Sale is correct on many points, his timeline just isn't accurate.
Economy - "Good or bad"
Environment - "Good or bad"
Wealth distribution - "Good or bad".
If you're betting, someone has to get 2 or more out of 3. But that could be anyone, including complete idiots. So this doesn't by itself tell you anything.
Most of the "bad" would be vaguely "left" positions but they could vary from the left of the NYT to any number of extreme positions as well as including general pessimists.
So at this level, "could be anything".
For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago.
In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding.
Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well.
So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to mean at the very minimum more than 50%) "the economy is not working for them." Which people are these? How do they compare for income or assets or access to things to their ancestors?
Have you been outside in any major city recently? There is a homeless crisis that is truly shocking going on around all of us.
A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.
Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.
A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.
Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.
The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
This is such a bitter note. I would have paid the 1000, but Kelly was very predatory. He set up a gotcha interview and then a surprise bet on some pretty wild claims from both sides.
In any case, the world has clearly gotten worse and more unpredictable, so the spirit of the bet favours Sale, but because he lost to a technicality, now he's being compared to trump??
By what measure? Crime? Child mortality? Global poverty? Death by warfare?
Since 1995, crime, child mortality, global poverty and death by warfare are all dramatically down.
W. Gibson, N. Stephenson or David Brin (his earth is a highly recommended read) are certainly people I would never bet against in a long bet. The predictive power of some science fiction is fascinating. I always wondered if it is the books that predict the future or if they are the shaping it, by becoming part of culture.
For reference; I'm an altruist, open source developer and value creator. My enemies are greedy psychopaths and zero-sum value capturers.
It can if you are open-minded, less so if you are in an online community that aggressively demonises the out groups.
Newspapers and TV showed that message before. That did seem to go well. And shutting down parler and gab also seemed to work. Perhaps connectivity is not for the best in all cases.
> it easily solves problems that were almost unsolvable before
I don't think internet has solved that many problems that were almost unsolvable before 2000.
> Tech have some problems but still, it's amazing.
The atomic bomb is also amazing, but it's a menace anyway. Tech needs control. A lot of it.
Case in point: I recently started back with the DVD side of Netflix. This is what I remembered being so awesome: find a good movie list, add it to your queue, pop envelopes in the mailbox when you're done.
It is 1000% better than endless scrolling on 5 different streaming services. I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I avoided the whole smart-home fad because there's nothing wrong with physical controls and buttons that have been developed over generations of human interaction. That's why I'm waiting for a good built-in-the-USA electric instead of buying a chassis with a touchscreen.
But someone else may hate controls and love touchscreens -- cool. The market lets us pick and choose.
If we can continue to reign in the inequality and environmental impacts produced by technology, use the incredible wealth we have as societies to finally end poverty, and continue to make progress against injustice, the future is incredibly bright.
I don't get why you wouldn't be able to do this on a streaming service, unless the catalogue is somehow worse. The DVD part sounds like a superfluous and cumbersome extra layer
Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.
What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.
Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.
You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.
This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).
> has enriched a very small number of people
This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.
I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!
There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.
The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".
What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?
Tech I don't blame, but the chase of more tech and bad tech is something I'm jaded about.
People commented here that the scientific/engineering miracle in their pocket is mostly used to swipe cat pics. Meanwhile bad management, weird economic structures, changes in social relationships.. all these going in the wrong direction.
Big changes have been made trough technology. And many of those changes have a negativ impact on our society.
But I strongly believe that humanity can overcome those problems. Altough it may seem impossible from time to time.
1. an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930;
2. a rebellion of the poor against the monied;
3. a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
---
# Condition 1:
Well, the Covid-related depression could be described as worse than in 1930, but it's a toss-up, especially if you don't focus on the US. However, the dollar has not been rendered worthless at all. And while the population is struggling, the world and the US' base of industrial production and infrastructural services are in reasonable working order.
So condition 1 is NOT MET.
# Condition 2:
The poor have not rebelled against the monied. In most of the world, there is some Covid-related unrest - some demonstrations, some strikes (a really huge one in India recently, but maybe not quite Covid related). In the US there has been a wave of mass protests, occasionally bordering on riots, regarding police violence and fueled by Covid. But that has not gotten anywhere close to a rebellion against the monied. I _wish_ it would have, but:
Condition 2 is NOT MET.
# Condition 3:
Is Covid an environmental catastrophe ? Naah, that's too much of a stretch. There's Global Warming - but it's currently only grave, not catastrophic. One might argue the catastrophe is now just a matter of time (not sure I would accept the argument) - but this is a timed bet.
You also have things like mass deforestation destroying cultures; or the state of the great barrier reef etc. But still,
Condition 3 is NOT MET.
------------
Kelly squarely wins the bet. That Patrick guy evaluated the situation unfairly.
But first, before we get to the results, let us pad this story out to 5000 words :/
not even close.
things are quite in chaos here and there, as is normal, but it certainly hasn't turned into this absurd mad max scenario that was described.
On nearly every single measure for a good life that we have, life is better and more equitable than ever across the world.
We were near-sighted, then we put on glasses. We're sharing a time of adjustment. 25 years isn't enough. What do the young say?
Be careful what you wish for. You may not like it as much as you think you will...
2020 was the closest I’ve come to feeling that society was collapsing.
Biology can only do so much if we ignore it.
Rich screw poor. Poor want to strike back.
In theory everyone could be happy. It's just that there is a lack of willingness for it to happen.
QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.
Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?
That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.
I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.
On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.
Can people be super dependent on a financial system if it weren't digital?
Even government—people had more freedom under a low-tech monarchy than a high-tech democracy. Can't enforce too many laws when law enforcement doesn't have vehicles or phones.
The only way I could fathom "society collapsing" is if I felt the interactions you see on the internet were an accurate reflection of society at large. It's not - not even close.
Shall we conflate "technological progress" with "predatory capitalism"?
If your answer is "yes" then Sale is right. If your answer is "no" then Kelly is right.
---
Technology by itself never "destroys" anything except certain ways of life, perhaps, and even then many people opt not to have their way of life destroyed or disrupted (assuming they have the choice, which not all do). Case in point: a chunk of the modern people no longer want to live in the cities and start living in more rural areas again (I don't keep around the link for the study though).
Many people described technology as a weapon: it can be used for a number of purposes.
Can it be argued that the more advanced technology has made it easier for the bad guys and thus their predatory capitalism is destroying society? Sure, I would agree with that. But it made it easier for the good guys, too. Arms races will always exist, it seems.
But I can't deny things started grim lately. Not sure what the answer is but it surely isn't destroying all tech.
We do however have to stand up to some corporations, that much seems clear.
yeah, no thanks. nasty, brutish and short.
Things are better and worse. It is probably impossible to calculate the net difference, but I'd highlight things like the legalization of gay marriage, the decline in violent crime, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as improvements. I don't discount the better toys either.
Kelly expresses his horror of "no, no, no" when remembering his experiences travelling in technology poor locales in Asia.
'The journey, lasting for the better part of a decade, transformed him. “I was in very remote parts of Asia, parts of which were literally medieval societies in every respect, from the dress, architecture, beliefs, behavior,” he says. “I saw completely vehicle-less cities—people throwing garbage in the streets, no toilets. That's not even to mention the hinterland villages, which were without even metal.” When he returned to the US in 1979, he had a deep appreciation for the technology that made life easier.'
Kelly is focused on convenience. Convenience is reasonably a good thing. And this is the fundamental weakness of his position on the embrace of machine in human society. The mechanised society is clearly far more than just a more "convenient" human society.
There is a fundamental philosophical fork in the road that informs this question: is a human being, as an individual, a complete being, or is species as a whole (and including its civilizational artifacts) the complete being? This can be reworded as: do human beings have souls, or are we mere biological machines?
What Kelly does not consider -- and a cursory grep for "happy"/"happiness" in the Wired article seems to support this -- is what was the individual and social experience of these technology poor societies. Does having "no metal" preclude happiness? Does is possibly promote it?
As hacker news denizens neck deep in technology rich societies, the germinal question is whether we are happier because of technology or not. Obviously we enjoy greater conveniences. Are our societies healthier than before, or not?
Technology comes in two conceptual flavors: as tool, and as garment (immersive environment). It is the latter kind of technology which requires moderation, as it alters our perception and social experiences (whether by extending and/or enhancing senses, or collapsing spatial (transport tech) and temporal (a/v tech) aspects of our reality).
Naturally, those who hold that man is merely a biological machine, should and would argue for unimpeded integrtion of technology into human societies, and in its extremist manifestation, into the very unit organism itself. And it seems entirely reasonable that those of us who reject the notion of a soul-less Human being, to insist that there must be limits to unfettered adoption of technology, for the sake of Human happiness, and well being.
The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.
But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.
I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.
What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?
Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.
Let it go, guys. He's gone, isn't he?
And of Trump's supposed attack on democracy, that's how you'd characterize it if you were interested in the corrupt status quo.
Are you speaking about the average looking male group who can't get tinder hookups?
Definitely becoming a major issue now. I think they're generally gross and it's obvious why they're single, but there has to be an underlying reason for the trend.
The world continuously becoming more sexually liberal also means that women are more likely to pursue these men, and so average men are looked down upon moreso than before.
I'm sure plenty of people have seen the Tinder/Bumble studies where men rated women around 50/50 attractive/unattractive, whereas women rated men 20/80. I believe this is a result of the above, and a lot more nuanced aspects of the change in culture over the last say, 30-40 years.
In my grade school all of the girls had a crush on one or two guys even the less pretty ones. No one had a chance. High school was similiar. Going to rock concerts changed that as I started to meet girls with similiar interests. Going to a concert would automatically give me a leg up because we were now part of a social circle. Later on in life I would go to a karoke bar and just the act of showing up a few times on the same day for a few weeks puts you in a social circle with others who do the same.
I don't know if things have changed all that much aside from the amount of people online. I use to meet girls from bbses / the early social media sites. The differences is they were smaller and you felt like part of a social circle.
Today I would advise to try to go to social meetups like photography in the park groups.. try to join a smaller group.
In the end the girls from my elementary school grew up and married. Everyone married similiar to them. If they are overweight so are there husbands. If they were an 8 their husbands would be an 8. If they are a 4 their husbands are a 4. They general look like each other.
My guess is the girls from your primary school will end up with someone similiar to them and so will you.
Men will find happiness in porn, paid sex and virtual sexual experiences and will find that women can't live up to those experiences and men will not be satified with regular women.
An average women's sexual peak is later in life and they will not be as satified with virtual sex in the same way.
There will be a need for younger men from an older women group that could bridge the divide.
If you are young and want casual sex go on courage life not tinder for better results.
Unless we’re talking about polygamy or China’s one child policy. Those definitely create a lot of single men with no hope.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170213-why-millions-o...
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/china-now-335-million-men-women...
The median number of lifetime sexual partners for men and women is fairly steady over the last twenty years: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlif...
It's a laziness trap, but it has become a lifestyle for some. I don't agree with it, but it exists.
In all relationships, romantic or not, personality is everything. Do you try to be a positive person, or do you complain every time something doesn't go your way? An attractive personality and some self-confidence can go a long way in making you attractive to others, even if you haven't been particularly advantaged by your genes.
If you're talking about the dynamics around bars, hookups, and dating apps, you know that's not the only way to meet people, right? I think some of the strongest relationships come out of shared interest in a hobby / skill / career. Join hobby groups etc (not with the intention of finding a partner -- that will be weird and creepy -- but remain open to the idea that you might bump into someone along the way that really aligns with you)
What's more tragic about it is that it has increasingly little to do with merit or hard work and increasingly more to do with dumb luck. It's all social networking; but that's totally random. People are only selecting friends and partners based on capital these days, not based on any other meaningful characteristic. People are just appendages to the capital... Capital is the agent. People are replaceable.
You can thank the reserve banks for that.
An unfathomable number of people alive today have totally pointless lives because all the good stuff has been taken out and substituted with cheap thrills.
It's no coincidence that rich people have many friends and experience a lot of positive emotions in their lives. I guarantee you that poor people experience very few positive emotions and they don't have a choice. The glass ceiling is unbreakable.
This is pretty condescending!
So, I think for someone who doesn't want to play "the dating game", yes, an effective dating strategy is to accept that they won't be able to easily find a partner in the short-term. Instead, a strategy of self-improvement combined with leading a more social life (via hobby groups etc) in which one regularly meets new people is a great way for them to eventually bump into someone they vibe with really well.
I think many people who are desperate for a partner are also unhappy in other aspects of their life -- joining non-romantic social groups centered around a common interest is a great cure for loneliness, until the right person comes along.
https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120
What do you think accounts for this change? Seems pretty plausible to me that it has something to do with technology. Perhaps it has something to do with dating apps, perhaps young men are substituting porn for real intimacy, perhaps some combination. Either way, doesn't seem like a good change. And by the pigeonhole principle, if more women are having sex than men, it must be the case that some men are sleeping with multiple women (modulo homosexuality and young women sleeping with older guys).
(I don't think "you just need to be a better partner" moralizing has much explanatory power, it's a lecture that can be delivered in any time or place to any gender and doesn't speak to underlying trends.)